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Arcane Brilliance: Mage add-on guide for Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we look add-ons your mage might want to download or update for Mists of Pandaria. There are some great mage add-ons out there, but somebody needs to make one that tracks warlocks. I just think it'd make things a bit easier if I knew exactly how much killing I needed to do in a given area at all times. We're down to just days now, guys. Days. I've been playing this game for the better part of 7 years now and at this point it's sort of amazing that I'm still capable of getting excited about anything it throws at me, but I have to say that I'm pretty damn giddy right now. I want to make a panda. I want to teach it to conjure pastries and hurl fireballs. I want to gain 5 levels on my main. I want to explore Azerothian Asia. I want to learn to sew new and prettier pairs of pants. I want to put a Rune of Power right outside Hot Topic, then just stand there like Gandalf, making sure all the warlocks most certainly do not pass. But there are still a few items of business to attend to before that expansion hits and I can do all those infinitely fun things. We've already discussed a lot of them. A quick recap: Talent spec guide Glyph guide General guide to mage changes in patch 5.0.4 and beyond Spell rotation guide Guide to stat weights and reforging The item on today's agenda is mage add-ons. Every major patch or expansion is guaranteed to break all of your add-ons. Things you've depended upon for months suddenly stop working, and you look to to the heavens and cry out in anguish, your faith in a benevolent God shaken to its very core because Mage Nuggets is down. Well fear not. Most of the add-ons you love and need are already updated and ready for Mists to drop.
Arcane Brilliance: Optimizing your mage's gear through Rawr
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about what is arguably the game's most trusted gear optimization program: Rawr. Also, we're planning to see how many times I need to type the word "rawr" before my spellchecker snaps and murders me through my computer screen. Close your eyes. Imagine, if you will, that you have a mage. Ha ha, of course you have a mage. Sometimes I crack myself up. Now imagine that your mage has gear, but that gear is not optimal. Now open your eyes. Hello, every mage ever. Yeah, chances are pretty close to 100% that no matter who you are and how religiously you play the game, your mage, beloved though he may be, does not have every slot filled with best-in-slot gear and does not have every item perfectly gemmed, enchanted and reforged so that your DPS is up to its fullest possible potential. WoW is a computer game -- an old one, sure, but still home to millions of algorithms and formulas and computations and other math terms that I don't fully understand. It would take, I firmly believe, a robot from the future to calculate all of those numbers and variables and turn them into something a human brain can parse accurately enough to actually benefit from. Well, mages and magesses, I have recently contacted Kavan, one of the main authors of the ubiquitous gear optimization program Rawr, and I can tell you that he is that robot from the future. I only pray he can protect us from whatever other, more evil and technologically advanced robot from the future that might at some point follow him through the wormhole with a directive to kill our unborn children or something, because you know that's what's happening.
